Biography/Poetry: Biography, autobiography? What is the reader looking for? A truthful portrait of a private life? An historically accurate account of a public life? Or both of these, if one grants the possibility of either or both? With Adam Feinstein's biography of the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, A Passion for Life, appropriately appearing this year on the centenary of the poet's birth in Parral, a small town in southern Chile, these are questions that spring to mind, writes Michael Smith.
Neruda was born in 1904 and christened Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. His mother died a little more than two months after his birth. Two years later his father moved to the town of Temuco, where he remarried. The poet's stepmother was a kind and caring woman for whom Neruda retained deep affection throughout her life. His relationship with his father, however, was a difficult one. Don José del Carmen was as strict with his family as he was generously sociable with his friends. For most of his life he earned his living as a driver of ballast trains that dumped coarse gravel between the rail ties to stop them from being blown away by the violent gales and rains of southern Chile. The idea of his son wanting to be a poet seemed to him a lunacy. He never changed this opinion, and Neruda changed his name in order to keep his father in the dark about his poetry activities.
Feinstein meticulously supplies the complicated details of Neruda's background. How much it adds to our understanding of the adult poet, however, is questionable. But as much can be said of most biographies unless the biographer has become convinced that he or she holds the key to the subject's personality, as for instance, Edmund Wilson in his classic essay on Charles Dickens, and uses background material to validate the key. Still, we do learn that Neruda did not come from the same deprived background as his compatriot, César Vallejo. The committed Stalinist Communist of later life had a keen appreciation of bourgeois creature comforts, although for periods of his life he did not have the opportunity to indulge them. But he did when he could.
Neruda's compulsive passions were poetry, women, politics and Nature (with a capital N). It is impossible to put these into a specific order of importance, to say that at any time which passion was most predominant. Neruda would probably have responded to this kind of analysis by saying that his passion was for Life in all its manifestations and a detestation of anything he perceived as repressive. With admirable objectivity, Feinstein's biography records the consequences of these passions.
By the time he was 20, Neruda's Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair had brought him fame in Latin America and, in time, internationally (by 1961, more than a million copies of this small book had been sold throughout the world in numerous editions).
The ultimate accolade came to him in 1971 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In politics, his greatest achievement, and I think he thought this himself, was his championship of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and his organisation of the transportation of 2,000 Spanish refugees to Chile on the converted cargo vessel Winnipeg. His tireless and innovative activity in this venture saved most of these refugees from death in French, Spanish and Moroccan concentration camps.
Neruda married three times and had numerous mistresses. He was undoubtedly a determined womaniser. His treatment of the women in his life, both wives and mistresses, like that of his friend Picasso, is not something to be easily admired, however explained. Feinstein records many of these sexual relationships without exploiting erotic or sordid details.
All of this aside, it is Neruda's poetry that matters now. Deeply read in Spanish, French and English literature (in their original languages), and in others in translation, Neruda's starting point, like that of most Spanish modernists, was the poetry of Rubén Darío. The Nicaraguan poet, himself profoundly influenced by French modernism, gave poetry in Spanish a huge injection of life, somewhat in the way that the Wordsworth of the Lyrical Ballads did. But perhaps even more important than Darío was Walt Whitman. As Whitman became the voice of North America, so Neruda saw his role as the voice of Latin America. Although a poet who constantly renewed himself (his poetic output was prolific), Neruda evolved in three major stages: the early love poetry under the influence of symbolism (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), the deeply personal and unhappy poetry of Residencia en la tierra, and finally the Whitmanesquely public and celebratory poetry of the Canto general and Odas Elementales. This is far too simplistic, of course, but it is a useful rough guide.
Reading Feinstein's book, one marvels at the number of now famous artists Neruda knew and the places he travelled to and lived in. He was a man with an enormous appetite for friendships and experience. His position in the Chilean diplomatic service, despite being badly paid, provided him with many valuable opportunities to fulfil these appetites. His literary success made him some enemies, such as the Argentinian Borges and the Spanish Juan Ramón Jiménez. But he refused to be embroiled in literary enmities. Political enemies were another matter. Capitalist imperialism, especially that of the United States, and fascism, were his frequent targets. His persistent loyalty to Stalinist Communism should be taken in this context. He was not the only artist to be deceived by Stalin. His hope for Chile was fuelled by the great Communist experiment in Russia: to admit its failure would have been to lose hope for a better Chile, which he saw in a Communist system.
Like the vatic poets Shelley and Whitman, Neruda in his poetry is a larger-than-life-figure. In life he was, as he admitted himself, a man of many contradictions, a mixture of good and bad like all of us. The mistake should not be made, as it was made in the past in criticism of Shelley and Whitman, to confuse the private man and the voice of the poet. Feinstein does not make this mistake. His biography illuminates the poetry without diminishing the man. It is a revelatory and just record of the man and the poet.
Neruda died shortly after the murder of his friend, President Allende. The news of the Pinochet coup devastated him, at the time when he was himself dying of cancer.
It's a pleasure to have W.S. Merwin's 1969 version of the Twenty Love Poems available again in a handsome paperback format. My one complaint is that a few errors of the earlier version have not been corrected. A little more care would have remedied this.
Michael Smith is a poet and translator. A new selection of his poems, The Purpose of the Gift, and a volume of translations, Maldon & Other Translations, will be published in October and launched in Poznan, Poland